Revealing the Real Picture Behind Safety Performance Statistics

摘要

Traditional safety performance continues to be centred round measurements such as Lost Time Injury Frequency Rate (LTIFR) or Total Recordable Injury Rate (TRIR). In themselves, these metrics do not provide an adequate picture of actual safety performance. Naturally, all organisations want to see a continuous improvement in their safety performance as reflected by a steady decrease in LTIFR and / or TRIR. The downside to such measurements is that they do not take into account normal fluctuations that are inevitable, due to the randomness of accidents and incidents. All too often, a period of good safety performance is followed by a period of poor performance. It is not uncommon for this to promote an instinctive reaction by management to investigate what has gone wrong and make changes to correct the problem. Unfortunately, in many cases, a clear picture of what is happening is not available, resulting in uninformed decisions being taken. It is easy to paint a false picture with numbers. This paper describes the issues surrounding misinterpretation of safety performance figures and proposes an alternative metric which can be used not only to measure improving (or otherwise) safety performance but will also accommodate random short term fluctuations in safety figures.